Originally Marotori were hosting out of a data centre in Maidenhead, but being based in Guildford the location was simply too far away. 4D had just been set up by David Barker, and although the business was relatively new to the market, moving to a better location was critical to our business. We liked and trusted what we heard and decided it was worth the move.
One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced over the years as a business has been with the hardware. It’s a tough call to make as there’s a lot of profit to be made in providing the hardware to customers as well as the hosting services but it requires a substantial investment.
We made the decision to migrate approximately 80% of our business over to 4D’s cloud platform last year. Everything with the migration went perfectly. The team rolled out the servers needed very quickly and although we came across a very odd network issue they were able to locate the obscure Ethernet card that was causing the problem and debug it within a few hours. By moving over to the cloud the biggest risks to our business, such as having a hard disk fail, have been removed.
4D offers great support, ranging from our account manager right through to third line support where I can work closely with the guys to fix any problems quickly and effectively. What’s more with this migration we’ve been able to consolidate our rack equipment down from three full racks to just over one.
When we originally started the business we were just using rack space and transit but when we moved to 4D our requirements evolved into much more. The initial onboarding was absolutely painless and the team quickly demonstrated their technical competence by debugging an initial connectivity issue. Since then we’ve built an excellent relationship with the technical team who have always been prompt to respond when problems have arisen.
In addition, we’re a small business but from our clients’ perspective it’s important that we are within the London area. By working with 4D and utilising their services fully I can provide that level of service to our clients while being location independent myself and simply knowing that any hardware problems are just sorted.
At the moment we have to maintain some racks due to the nature of some of our financial service clients however, in the long term we will be moving to a pure cloud environment. When The Solution every solution that has been required has been delivered on time and in budget with excellent aftercare then it makes perfect sense.
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